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Building a New Nursing Service: Respectability and Efficiency in Victorian England
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 July 2014
Extract
The main problem in staffing military hospitals with female nurses, Florence Nightingale explained in 1857, was to find “respectable and efficient women” who would be willing to undertake such work. Many women would apply for the positions but few would be acceptable. “Many a woman who will make a respectable and efficient Assistant-Nurse [the equivalent of our modern staff nurse] under the eye of a vigilant Head-Nurse, will not do at all when put in a military ward,” Nightingale said, because, “As a body, the mass of Assistant-Nurses are too low in moral principle, and too flighty in manner, to make any use of.” Nightingale thought that efficient and respectable assistant nurses had “in a great degree, to be created.” Developing respectability and efficiency in hospital nurses were the two major goals of nineteenth-century nursing reformers, and vigilant supervision was to be the major method for achieving them.
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*
I thank the Wellcome Trust, the Hanna Institute for the History of Medicine, and Wellesley College's History Department for funding that made possible research for this article.
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